“That’s wonderful. Next question, Milo: One of the neighbors saw an Everett police officer enter the house a little while ago and he has not come back out. May I speak with him, please?”
“Gee, Bob, I don’t see any reason for that, at least not at this point. You’ll have to take my word that he’s doing just fine. He’s decided to take a little break in here and join the party.”
“You never answered my question regarding injuries. Does anyone in the house require medical attention?”
Milo glanced at the hero boyfriend, wondering whether he was even still alive. His face was pale and his lips were purple and he appeared either dead or knocking at the door. “You know,” he said casually, “everyone in here has been pretty cooperative. Aside from a minor bruise or two, we’re all doing just peachy.”
“I’m glad to hear that. Since that’s the case, let me tell you a little bit about myself. I’ve been a law-enforcement professional for almost seventeen years and a member of the Everett Hostage Negotiation Team for the last ten years. I’ve seen these things end well and I’ve seen them end badly, and I very much want this particular situation to end well.
“My question to you, Milo, is this: What do we need to do to ensure a happy ending to this scenario?”
“A happy ending,” Milo repeated into the phone. “Well, let’s see. You need to understand that I am in control here. The first time I see someone sneaking along the side of the house, everyone dies. The first time you people try to storm the house, everyone dies. The first time a flash-bang comes through a window, anywhere in the house, everyone dies. Do you see where this conversation is going?”
“You’ve made yourself very clear. Thank you for that. It’s important everyone know where they stand. And that includes you, Milo. I’m sure you realize that as long as all the people in that house stay alive and unharmed, things are much more likely to end well. Now, let’s get down to the heart of the matter—”
Milo almost laughed out loud. The heart of the matter. That was a good one, considering he had come so close to stabbing the hero boyfriend right in the heart. The pig cop negotiator continued droning on and Milo had to force himself to concentrate. All he wanted was to get back to the couch and resume his work with the little bitch lying there so invitingly.
“So, really,” the pig cop negotiator was saying, “what it all boils down to is this: what do you want? If you tell us why you’re doing this, maybe we can take some action to resolve whatever is bothering you and we can all go home.”
Except me, Milo thought. Me, you would just as soon shoot in the head as not. That little nugget you’re keeping to yourself, though, aren’t you? He forced himself to calm down and focus. All he needed was to buy enough time to finish what he had started.
“What’s bothering me?” he answered. “Tell you what, let’s get into that later. First things first, as you so aptly stated a moment ago. We’ve been having so much fucking fun in here that everyone is famished. How about you send out for a couple of pizzas for us?”
He partially covered the telephone’s mouthpiece with his hand, making sure he could be heard through the line. “What kind of pizza do you guys like?” he said, getting dull stares in return, at least from the two other conscious people in the room. They didn’t seem to care about pizza. Neither did the dead guy or the unconscious one. “Pepperoni? Sounds good,” he pretended to answer.
“Did you hear that?” he said into the line. “We’ve reached a consensus that pepperoni is the way to go. I’m more of a veggie man myself, but in the interest of demonstrating that I can play well with others, I’ve decided to toe the company line. So you go ahead and work on getting that food for us, and when you’ve done that, you call back and we’ll discuss the next step. How does that sound?”
There was a short pause on the other end of the line. Finally Lieutenant Sanders—Bob—said, “Of course we can get some pizza for you. But I’m sure you realize we will need something in return, some gesture of good faith on your part. Perhaps you could release one of the people inside the house in exchange for the food?”
“We’ll talk about that when the pizza actually arrives. It’s been a pleasure working with you, Bob. Remember, no stupid moves. Let’s all try to row in the same direction. Talk to you soon, Bob.” He placed the handset gently down on the receiver and turned toward the little bitch on the couch, happy he had gained some time and excited he could now get back to work.
CHAPTER 50
The pain in Cait’s arm was excruciating. It felt as though she had jammed the entire limb into a roaring fire in Victoria’s fireplace. She had anchored the long flap of skin in place with her left hand before the crazy bastard Milo duct-taped her arms to her belly, and as soon as he walked away to answer the telephone, she lifted her body into a sitting position.
She was able to protect the injury a bit, at least for the time being, huddling as much of her body around it as possible. She knew it wasn’t going to matter, that the moment he returned he would force her back into a horizontal position and resume his ghoulish work, but it was a reflexive reaction to the trauma inflicted on her body and one she could not have prevented even if she wanted to.
In the kitchen, Milo replaced the phone on its cradle and hurried back, looking a bit preoccupied but smiling down at her like a doctor who had been called away on an emergency. “I’m sorry for the interruption,” he said sweetly. “Those people can be real pests. Now, where were we? Do you remember?”
The terror returned with a vengeance and Cait babbled into her gag, trying to beg for her life, trying to tell him she would do whatever he wanted if only he would stop peeling the skin from her body, but of course it was no use. She could not make herself understood and knew it wouldn’t matter even if she could. She began hyperventilating, panting into her gag, feeling faint and light-headed, almost wishing she would pass out so the pain and fear would just go away.
No such luck.
Milo reached out and placed his strong hands on her shoulders and forced her back down on the couch. The moment he let go, her body sprang back up into the sitting position in a desperate attempt to protect her arm.
He made a disappointed tsk-tsk sound with his tongue and said, “Apparently you’ve decided not to cooperate. That’s unfortunate, as you’ll soon discover. Normally, your reticence would translate into just that much more fun for me, but since we’re under a mounting time crunch, I’ll have to handle things a bit differently than I’d like.” Then he ripped the duct tape off Cait’s bare belly without so much as a word of warning. Tiny flecks of skin came with the tape, bonded to the super-sticky surface like flies to flypaper but Cait barely noticed. All she could think about was what was to come.
She lifted her injured arm over her head, left hand still clamped over the awful injury, in a desperate attempt to remove it from Milo’s reach. He fumbled on the floor for his duct tape and ripped off another long strip, holding it in front of Cait’s eyes with an evil smile.
She knew he was waiting for a reaction and willed herself not to give it to him, but she simply couldn’t stop herself. She whimpered and moaned into her gag and he watched for a moment, eyes glazed. Cait noted dispassionately in a dusty corner of her brain that he was getting off on her fear and was disgusted by the knowledge.
He sat and watched her, doing nothing, lost in his reverie, stupid smile creasing his face, and then something seemed to click in his head and he pushed her roughly onto her back once more. He grabbed her left arm and slammed it against the back of the couch, then wound the duct tape over it and around the couch’s wooden frame, effectively immobilizing her.
The flap of skin he had created with his knife before the telephone rang hung loosely off her arm now, wet blood dripping onto her belly. The flap was maybe eight inches long and a couple of inches wide—a tiny landing strip carved into her arm—and Cait stared at it with renewed horror as the pain re-intensified, the nerve endings in her arm screaming and complaining and beggin
g for relief.
She panted and moaned and cried into her gag and watched her captor with wild eyes, praying for Kevin to leap out of his chair, miraculously healed, duct-tape bindings flying off him like in a Hollywood movie, or for the dead police officer to spring suddenly back to life and save the day.
But none of that happened. Kevin lay unmoving and pale next to Victoria, and the police officer remained just as dead as he had been since Milo dropped him in the doorway like so much cordwood.
Then the determined psychotic got to work, muttering something about time pressure and pizza deliveries, of all things, and how it was so unfair. Cait didn’t understand what the hell he was talking about, but forgot all about it a second later, because that was when he placed the blade of his knife against her skin next to the landing strip he had already made and began carving another.
He drew deftly back on the blade and lifted another strip of skin right off her arm, maybe a half-inch thinner than the first but just as long, and the pain ratcheted up again, she hadn’t thought it possible, but God help her, it was. Cait wailed into her gag and bucked against her bindings and she felt the knife dig into the meat of her arm as a result but she continued to struggle as she lost what little remained of her self-control. Her arm burned and throbbed in fiery agony and she forgot all about Victoria and Kevin and even Milo the Butcher himself, as her entire being was fixed on the damage being done to her right arm.
The room turned red around the edges of her vision and a buzzing began in her ears—it sounded as though an airliner was taking off right in the living room—and somewhere deep inside her head Cait knew she was about to lose consciousness. She was going to pass out from the intense pain and she welcomed the relief. She willed herself to lose consciousness, to escape this torture. Whether she lived or died was irrelevant, the only thing that mattered was somehow putting an end to this terrible burning agony consuming her right forearm.
But she didn’t pass out. She wasn’t so lucky. Through the pounding red pain she watched her torturer do his gruesome work. He completed his second pass with the knife, finishing the second tiny runway right next to the first, and examined his handiwork with a critical eye. He was breathing heavily; sweat dotting his skin just above his upper lip.
He glanced at her face and smiled when he noticed her watching him. “Looks good,” he said, as though they were discussing tomorrow’s weather forecast or the chances of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers reaching the playoffs.
And then he spoke and sent a chill through Cait’s overtaxed brain. She hadn’t thought things could get any worse. Surely this was it. Surely he was done. Surely he would get up and walk away and leave her alone now.
But this wasn’t it. He wasn’t done. He didn’t get up and walk away. Instead he smiled that devil’s smile and said, “What do you say we work on the other arm now?”
Cait began screaming anew as he reached up and pulled off the strip of tape anchoring her left arm to the back of the couch. He held her arm firmly with both hands as she tried to yank it away, anticipating her actions. He was incredibly strong, or maybe she was just so weakened by now that it wasn’t a fair fight. Either way, her struggle was short and it was over quickly and within seconds he had secured her arm—a fresh new canvas for his sick sculpture-work—over his lap.
Cait felt the knife blade sink into her flesh once again as the telephone began to ring in the background and someone cranked the volume of the buzzing in her ears to the max and the pain increased exponentially and Cait screamed into her gag and it felt like her head was going to blast right off her body and—
—and finally, mercifully, Cait Connelly lost consciousness.
CHAPTER 51
Milo had known the telephone would ring again and had likewise suspected it would happen at precisely the wrong time. After all, how long did it take to order a couple of fucking pizzas? On the bright side, his little torture toy had just passed out—he must be losing his touch; normally he could keep girls conscious for much longer—so it wasn’t like he was being forced to stop in the middle of his fun to answer the damned thing.
“What is it?” he barked into the phone, not bothering with the silly gamesmanship of the last call.
“Hello, Milo, this is Bob. Remember me?”
“Of course I remember you, Bob, we just spoke a few minutes ago, for chrissakes. Is there a point to this call? We’re all pretty busy in here enjoying ourselves and I’d like to get back to the party.”
“Of course, I understand. I just thought you might like to know the pizzas are on their way and will be here in the next few minutes. Is there anything else you think you might need?”
Jesus, Milo thought. Just my luck to get stuck with some fucking Martha Stewart party-planner-in-training. “No,” he said, trying to keep his voice calm. “The pizza will be plenty.”
“Okay, fine. Maybe now would be a good time to discuss how we’re going to get it into the house. I can have one of my men deliver it to the door, but I’ll need your assurance that you won’t take any action to harm him when he does. It would be a real career-ender for me to have a man killed delivering pizza, you know what I mean?”
Milo shook his head. Was this guy for real? “Don’t worry,” he said. “I promise I won’t hurt your precious police officer. I certainly don’t want to be responsible for ending your car—”
BOOM!
The entire house shook on its decades-old foundation as the front door was blown off its hinges. Instantly Milo knew he had been played for a sucker. There was no pizza, there was never going to be any pizza, the pig cops had been playing him just as he thought he had been playing them. Goddammit!
He rushed from the kitchen back into the living room, vaguely aware as he crossed the end of the hallway of the ruined door lying flat on the floor and a cluster of SWAT team members, suited up and armed for bear, gathered on the small front landing in the process of storming the house.
This sucked. He was not going to get to finish skinning the little bitch alive, but if he was going down, he would make good and goddamned sure he took her with him. Undoubtedly the rescue pigs would exercise at least a modicum of caution; hopefully that would give him the few seconds he would need to finish the girl.
She wouldn’t go in the way he wanted, slowly and in excruciating pain, but at least he would still have the opportunity to end her miserable life. With any luck, perhaps they would meet up again in hell and he could properly finish what he had started.
Milo rushed into the living room, knife clutched securely in his right hand. The little bitch lay half on the couch and half off it, her feet still securely taped to the armrest, her body flopped off the cushions, her bare shoulders, arms, and head lying on the floor. She was still unconscious, which represented another disappointment because Milo had hoped that he would at least get the satisfaction of knowing the bitch had seen it coming: terrifying a sweet, innocent little thing beyond her endurance as he pulled the knife blade across her throat from ear to ear, severing the jugular, would have been the perfect way to spend his last few seconds on earth.
No matter. It was time to get to it. He could hear the heavy clomp clomp clomp of SWAT Team boots on the bloodstained hardwood floor as they came to get him. He smiled. They would be too late. Maybe he could even finish off the little bitch and then leap across the room and dispatch Dear Old Mom before they came around the corner with guns blazing.
Mr. Midnight skidded to a stop in front of the prone body of his greatest conquest. She still hadn’t moved. Her head rested on her mutilated right arm, her left hand curled under her chest. A strip of bloody skin lay on the floor surrounded by tiny flecks of the bitch’s blood, apparently the result of her falling off the couch. It served the annoying pain-in-the-ass right.
He leaned over the motionless body and lowered his knife. It would take just a fraction of a second to draw the blade across her throat and end her life. He couldn’t wait.
CHAPTER 52
There it was
again, that relentless push, the feeling of a Flicker trying to force its way into her head, the very same sensation she had fought off time after time over the course of the last couple of hours. Cait’s eyes fluttered open and she tried desperately to focus, but she just couldn’t manage it, and then her eyes closed again of their own accord. She felt groggy and woozy and somehow oddly disconnected from her body. From somewhere far away came the sensation of millions of pins and needles being shot into her arm at the same time out of some hellish weapon.
Or maybe her arm was on fire. Yes, that was it, her arm was on fire. She was so very tired and all she wanted to do was sleep but she couldn’t because her arm was on fire, it was burning and blistering and the extreme unrelenting pain was keeping her awake.
And now came that infernal push and at first she tried to repel it one more time. But why? Why bother trying to resist it? What would be the point? Why had she tried to keep it out in the first place? There must have been a reason, maybe even a good one, but for the life of her she couldn’t remember now what it might have been.
So her eyes fluttered and her vision wavered and her arm burned horribly and finally she relented. She stopped trying to resist the push. She was too exhausted to concentrate that hard, anyway.
The moment she gave in, the Flicker flooded her brain, filling her senses with the sights and sounds and smells of a confrontation. It felt hyper-real. She could smell the stale pungent odor of sweat and adrenaline and fear; especially fear. Cait was inside Victoria’s body, she was inside her long-lost mother’s body, and her mother was trying to escape from…she was trying to escape from…oh, God, she was trying to escape from Milo!
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